Jessie Buckley is having a very interesting year. Even if she started 2020 with a role in the disastrous “Dolittle,” her role in Charlie Kaufman‘s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” has been praised by critics, as is her role in the upcoming fourth season of “Fargo.” Kaufman’s film is being dissected by pretty much everyone who has watched the weird adaptation of the Iain Reid novel, and it seems not even Buckley is able to explain the film.
In an interview with IndieWire, Buckley was asked whether she still refuses to try and explain “Ending Things,” as she had in interviews prior to the release of the film. “I think I probably still feel the same,” Buckley said. “I don’t think there’s anything finite about the film. I think it just poses all the questions. It’s hard to describe what it is to you or to anybody who watched it, because it’s your experience. It’s not something that’s finite for me either, and it never was. It was something that transcended and shifted and moved from when I read it to when I was playing it, to afterwards when I watched it. It’s not that I find it hard to describe, I just don’t think that’s what it’s asking us to do.”
“Everybody looks at everything in life from their own perspective, so it’s never going to be a prescriptive, exact observation for every single person,” the actor added. “You can’t please everybody. And anyway, art’s not meant to be appealing. It’s meant to provoke.”
That being said, Jessie Buckley did provide definitive answers to some questions about the film, specifically her character’s name.
“I think Charlie kind of just looked at me, and I presumed he was talking to me when he was looking at me,” the actress said with a laugh. “I don’t even know if he called me ‘Young Woman,’ but that’s how it’s written in the script. I don’t think Charlie was going, ‘You. Young Woman, you. Come here.’ I think he just called me Jessie!”
